The Second Cognitive Revolution by Bo Allesøe Christensen

The Second Cognitive Revolution by Bo Allesøe Christensen

Author:Bo Allesøe Christensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030266806
Publisher: Springer International Publishing


Immigration Policies of the United States Government

In the United States, the status of unauthorized immigrants represents a major topic of contestation in the political landscape. Those seeking restrictive immigration policies tend to advance two dominant themes. First, Americans are under siege by Latino/as crossing the nation’s southern border. For example, Patrick Buchanan wrote in 2006 that “real Americans” are witnessing “a great tragedy” that is unfolding, which imperils the entire nation (Buchanan 2006: 5). Iowa congressman Steve King conveyed this warning in 2013 with his tweet: “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”6 Congresswoman Michele Bachman warned in 2014 that the immigrant population was waging war on America. She said: “Innocent people are killed by illegal aliens and hurt and robbed and beaten and raped by criminal foreign nationals that are in our country.”7 The ‘immigration problem’ is depicted in militaristic terms, drawing upon images of a war against an invading force against the heart of this sacred land. At stake in this invasion is nothing less than the nation’s survival.

The second dominant theme from advocates of restrictive policy is that illegal immigrants are essentially criminals who pose serious dangers to law-abiding Americans. Their alleged crimes include sexual violence, murder associated with gang warfare, and drug smuggling. Also, immigrants crossing the nation’s southern border are accused of stealing material resources through illicit access to social services. Presidential candidate Donald Trump warned against the hordes of invading migrants who bring death and destruction to the United States. He added riveting imagery to this warning in his tweet of July 13, 2015: “El Chapo and the Mexican drug cartels use the border unimpeded like it was a vacuum cleaner, sucking drugs and death right into the U.S. ….They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” (Reilly 2016). His solution to the immigration problem seems crystal clear: the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States must leave the country either by choice or by force (Deb 2015).

Both themes reveal three sub-narratives. First, the immigrants have committed to a torrent of violence, second, such violence will recur in starkly augmented forms, and third, governmental actions must be taken for the survival of the country’s innocents, who are understood as native born Americans.

With these narratives, there is a rhetorical slight-of-hand with the term “criminal alien.” This term reveals while it conceals, showcasing some features of a category of people while surreptitiously blocking other features. “Criminal alien” illustrates how language usage can inform and suppress simultaneously. Some residents of the U.S. do commit crimes and some of them are unauthorized aliens by violating this nation’s immigration laws. But researchers have shown that immigrants are less likely to commit violent acts than the native-born (Vaughn et al. 2014, 1135). The rate of imprisonment of immigrants for violating criminal laws is actually lower than that for native-born residents. According to the 2010 American Immigration Council, the disparity in incarceration rates for 18–39-year-old men is significant—1.6% for immigrants and 3.3% for native-born. The disparity in incarceration rates is evident over different years of census taking (Ewing et al.



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